Here is a story I wrote for my writing class (and am going ot hand in today - last assessment woooooo!). I'd really love to hear thoughts on it (except maybe from one tall skinny black man who'll just say that it's bad...unless he has some
constructive criticism to add...I'm talking to you Rishi! [in case you hadn't picked up on my incredible subtlety]).
The mid morning sun slipped into the perfect position for its white light to strike the shining metal of a taxi below, and be thrown up again, directly onto the closed eyelids of Dominic Andreas. He was sitting in the driver’s seat with his head lulling awkwardly to the side of the head rest, slightly-too-long brown hair looking like it hadn’t been combed in a week, slow, heavy breaths passing through his gaping mouth. He screwed up his face as if in pain when the bright beam hit his eyelids, and, in a series of half movements, attempted to shift in his seat. When this proved too difficult, Dominic’s mouth closed and his eyes opened slightly.
“Shit,” and he closed his eyes again.
This wasn’t the first time Dominic had fallen asleep here, on the driver’s seat of this taxi, out the front of this rented home. He had been working nights for almost two and a half years now; two and a half years ago, it was only supposed to be a Temporary Job, for a bit of Extra Money. There had been a Plan. But the plan had collapsed over two years ago.
With a weak groan, Dominic forced himself from the seat and out into the strangeness of the glaring sun. The last couple of years had been dominated by the artificial lights of the city and the occasional glow of the moon that seemed to have no rhythm to its appearance. The sun was only hinted at by a faint glow low in the sky at the beginning and end of his shift.
Over this time, the front door of his house had become increasingly difficult to open. To get inside required an awkward action involving inserting the key (which had never quite fit the lock anyway), pulling it out to a specific point, and then turning with an upward push until it clicked. Even then, the door would not give until persuaded by a sharp shove of the shoulder, an act that used to hurt Dominic, but with which he now become so familiar that he barely noticed it. The effort was marked only by the constant presence of a murky blue bruise on the point of his shoulder, which was usually hidden under the light blue synthetic shirt of his uniform.
This house had been part of the Plan too. Like the Job, it was supposed to be Temporary, until they had enough money for a Mortgage in a Nice Suburb. It was a single storey cube of dark red bricks, separated from the concrete footpath only by a squat dark red brick fence and a metre wide patch of grass. Dominic made his way down the short hallway that led straight from the front door to his room at the back of the house, slowly, as his eyes tried to adjust to the shadow. There was a constant lack of light in this place. These old houses that shared both side walls with the neighbours were not built with natural light in mind, and the sixty watt globes they used at night provided only a dim yellow glow.
Dominic unbuttoned his shirt that had become soft from wear, much softer than he had ever planned it to become. He remembered the night when, slipping the top button through the final small slit, he realised how easy this motion was, when once it had once been a struggle. With a heavy breath, he climbed into the old off-white sheets of his bed and closed his eyes.
“Goodnight Marie,” he whispered. Goodnight, he felt her breathe in his ear.
Dominic could see the sky when he opened his eyes, although the dingy glass of the window by his bed dimmed the colours. Light emanated from somewhere below the roofs of the houses on the other side of the alley behind his house. It glowed in a line along the fake horizon, and, higher in the sky, faded eventually to darkness. Dominic looked at his clock. Ten to six. There was a movement in the corner of his eye and he turned his head back to the window. Nothing. Then a streetlamp flickered, and became a globe of white light. The other lamps lining the road responded. Each flickered in its own time and became solid, until the street was dotted with silent sentinels that illuminated the dark. Dominic smiled to them, before pulling the blind closed and switching on his own dim yellow light to get ready to go back to the taxi it seemed he had only just left.
In the night, it was impossible to see the drivers of the other cars on the road. Their faces were obscured by the darkness and tinted windows so that it was easy to forget they existed, that the cars weren’t just empty machines passing by. Even when Dominic picked up passengers, the bubble of protective perspex surrounding him did little to change this sense. And so he had developed a habit that unsettled the people on the other side of that bubble.
“Dom,” he mumbled. This was the name She used to call him. “Dom, look over there. Someone’s waving you down.” He pulled up to the curb beside a woman who got into the car, told him where she wanted to go, and then pulled a mirror from her purse.
“Where is she going, Dom? Looks like a date, doesn’t it.” Marie used to look at herself like that before they went out, after putting the thick dark lines around her eyes, wearing her tight black top that showed the tops of her breasts, the bottom of her belly, the sides of her hips above tight black jeans that sat so nicely under the firm round bulge of her stomach. Then she would look at him with her brow drawn and ask if she looked like a pregnant teenage tart. He would smile, move towards her, touch her cheek, run his hand down the long red of her hair, and, resting it on her belly, say that she looked beautiful. For a moment, her brow would knit up tighter as though someone had pulled the end of a thread hidden behind her forehead.
“I guess that’s what I am, though, baby, eh?”
“You’re not.”
Then she would laugh and her forehead would smooth away, and she would kiss him.
The woman paid Dominic without looking at him and got out of the taxi a little too quickly so that she had to pause on the footpath to smooth her hair.
A string of trips not much different from this made up most of Dominic’s nights. He would take a break at around two o’clock and pick up a sausage roll from some other man who was just working and didn’t care to speak to a stranger at this time of the night. Then he would have half and hour to find a place to sit that wasn’t already occupied by a hobo or a drunk couple. His favourite place was the bench closest to the road in the path that led through Hyde Park. It was brown and weatherworn, and often occupied by a man in rags who yelled at any Asians who passed and had once tried to come on to Dominic. Tonight, though, it was not taken. He sat down on one end of it, looking towards the other.
“Isn’t she beautiful, Dom.”
This was where he had met Marie. It was the same time of night, overcast and cold like winter although it was only April. Dominic’s long black trench coat did little to protect him from the wind as he made his way home after a date with some girl he had known in high school, a few years before. He couldn’t remember her name now.
His shoelace had come undone and was flicking against the ground as he had walked, so he wandered over to this bench, which was then freshly painted. He had paused when, fiddling with his laces, head bent down over his knees, there was a sudden burst of sobbing from the other end of the bench. He pulled his head up and looked around to see a girl who was sitting with her legs pulled up to her chest and her forehead on her knees. Her long black skirt had slid down to her hips, revealing white legs. Her face was hidden behind a sheet of red hair and her black-clothed body disappeared into the dark around it, leaving only the flow of white and red, and the sound of broken moans.
“Do you need help?”
She raised her head slightly and looked at him around her hair.
“I lost my bag and the guy I was with at the same time. Bit of a coincidence, eh?” She wiped her face with the back of her hand, smearing dark make up across her cheek. “You could walk me home.” And so they walked, but not to her house.
It wasn’t until the next day he found out how old she was. “Fifteen,” she said with a grin as she looked up from where she had slept nestled in his arm. He kissed her forehead and stroked the small of her back and couldn’t bring himself to care about her age.
Looking over at the bench, Dominic smiled, then went back to work, leaving the dinner’s plastic wrapping on the seat behind him.
He was called down by a grey-haired man with wrinkles around his eyes, a gut, and a woman half his age in a tight red dress. They sat in the back seat, cooing and giggling as Dominic drove them out of the city and through suburbs that eventually gave way to a winding road bordered by bush. They got out of the car at a driveway and paid Dominic, laughing and nibbling each other’s necks, and he drove back down the winding road. The headlights reached out in front of him, feeling their way over the limbs of white gums. The trees looked emaciated as shadows hid their full form and left only thin parts of branches brightly lit. Continuing to reach into the darkness, illuminating thousands of new leaves at every moment, the lights began to reveal something else. They panned up white legs, to a sheet of long red hair hanging down the back of a woman. She turned and extended an arm like the branches of the white gums, and Dominic glided to her side.
“Hi Dom.”
She looked just as he remembered. It seemed that the years had not managed to touch her. In fact, she looked so much like the picture in Dominic’s mind, the one he had been sleeping beside for the last couple of years, that he felt as though she had never left him.
“Where do you want to go?”
“We’d better get back to the house. The babysitter’s expecting us.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
The trees gradually began passing the car more quickly as Dominic relaxed his foot on the accelerator, but neither of the passengers noticed.
“Dom, baby, we almost have enough money for you to quit this shitty job. We can get a proper house for the baby, some place nice where we can grow old together.”
Dominic turned his head and smiled at her with such a spark in his eyes it seemed no one could ever be happier than he was. But some of it was borrowed light from a truck that had just appeared around a curve ahead. His face was lit brighter and brighter as they drew closer to the truck, and Marie smiled at how happy she could make him. And as they leaned toward each other the glow grew, until their lips met and they couldn’t hear the long loud note of the truck’s horn as they were engulfed by its headlights.
